Fifteen
JAFFA
Johanna said, “Here, read this.”
It was another letter. Edythe took it and saw at
once it was from Isabella, and written on the wrong side
again.
Johanna said, “That came this morning, by
ship.”
Edythe read, slowly. “She says she will fly Tyre as
soon as you send her a safe conduct into Acre. This must be soon.
Conrad is gone but not for long. Pray, send the safe conduct soon.”
She looked at Johanna. “Can you even issue a safe conduct?”
“I don’t know. Probably. Enough wax and ribbons
will carry it.” Johanna said, “ What do you think of it, though?
It’s on the wrong side again.”
Edythe turned the letter over and looked at the
seal. “I don’t think it was opened, like the others.”
Johanna said, in a low voice, “Could she have
gotten it out without him knowing?”
Their eyes met. Edythe said nothing. She was
thinking, Why then would she need the pretense of the false
letter? Johanna said, “No.”
Edythe said, “No, probably not.”
Johanna was already nodding. She said, “ We are
betrayed. This is Conrad’s work, the liar. He’s worse than a
Greek.” Her eyes widened. “He wants the safe conduct to sneak into
Acre and seize it.”
Edythe said, “Maybe. . .”
Johanna gave her a sly look. “You have some thought
in mind?” Her voice was bland.
“No, my lady,” she said, humbly.
“Good,” said Johanna. “ Leave this to me. Now help
me with this table.”
Edythe wondered why it mattered to her that Johanna
had this plot afoot, and that Acre was suspended on her whim. Guy
de Lusignan had gone back to Acre after the Crusade fell apart. Now
Johanna was giving a safe conduct into his city to his worst enemy.
Let him sink or rise, most likely sink, from what Edythe had seen
of him. Richard would suffer, but ho heigh. They had no loyalty to
her, and so she had none for them. It was all one to her, and one
was nothing.
But it was not nothing. She tried to grind away the
pebble beneath the blanket, but still it rubbed her. She longed to
see Rouquin again, who would never leave Richard. Richard had kept
his own kind of faith with her, protecting her secret. She hated
him less now that he had failed. With the rage against him in the
streets, she could not rage against him in her heart. And they had
fought so hard for Acre. And she thought of the old beggar by the
fountain there, and Berengaria’s garden.
Johanna had a safe conduct drawn up, allowing the
bearer and an escort into Acre, and covered with seals and stamps
and colored ink and a big ribbon. She concealed this in a letter to
Isabella. She did not hide it especially well, but she knew it did
not really need to escape notice, up there.
She wrote also to Guy of Lusignan, who was back to
ruling Acre now, that he should be ready to arrest anyone who used
it.
This seemed the perfect trap to her, which Conrad
himself had devised, and Conrad himself would set off. She kept it
out of Edythe’s sight. She knew Edythe was Richard’s creature, and
Johanna wanted to punish Conrad herself, by her own guile. Then she
would let him know, the lying snake, that she had done it. Edythe
might even admire this. Richard certainly would. Pleased, she sent
her letters off.
“They have come back from Jerusalem,” Berengaria
said.
She was sewing on an altar cloth. She had excellent
skill at this, and in the light of the candles the angel’s wing she
was composing in gold thread looked as smooth as honey. Her own
sleeve was worn, and soiled at the edge; her ladies took poor care
of her.
“They never reached Jerusalem,” Edythe told her.
She was holding the cloth on her knees, to steady it for the
Queen’s needle. They were sitting in her chamber, where around them
the other women went on chattering in their own tongue. Berengaria
alone of all the Navarrese had bothered to learn French. “The
Crusade failed.”
“Well, then,” Berengaria said, watching her fingers
with the needle and thread. “ Will we then go back to Acre?”
Edythe said, “ I don’t know, my lady.”
Berengaria gave her a quick look. “You want Acre
too?” She stopped sewing and faced Edythe.
“ I want what you want, of course.”
Still watching Edythe, the little Queen smoothed
the gold thread with her thumb. She said, “ I want to go back to
Acre.”
Edythe was thinking they might never be able to go
back to Acre. Conrad, whatever he was, was far too clever for Guy,
and if he seized the great city in the north he would not let the
Crusaders in again, as he had not let them into Tyre. She
considered what Berengaria had just said.
“You could write the King and ask him.”
“ I could send a messenger,” Berengaria said. “ I
cannot read or write, my lady, alas. You know this.” She made no
move to do anything, but stared at Edythe, as if she could put her
thoughts into Edythe’s mind.
Edythe said, “ I could write it for you.”
Berengaria smiled at her. She had said the right
thing. Berengaria said, “You write him. You tell him better.” She
nodded. “Help me, I help you.”
“My Lady, I—”
Berengaria shuffled her hands in front of her.
“Just do. Bring paper and pens.” And Edythe wrote exactly what the
Queen wished to say to her husband, and beneath it, wrote, Go to
Acre, quickly.
A letter came back, a few lines of script: He
would let them go back to Acre in the spring. Ricardus R. No news,
nothing personal. Nothing to Edythe. Berengaria said, “ Will I ever
be truly Queen of the English?”
“My lady, only God could tell you that. It has been
a strange marriage, that I can say. But, you know, I have seen few
marriages that are not strange.” She was thinking of Eleanor and
Henry. “You could make a garden here.”
“ Here, there, everywhere,” Berengaria said, in a
sharp voice. This was so unlike her that Edythe gawked at her. The
little Queen threw down the letter. “ I could as well have heard
from my father. I am tired of waiting.” She waved at Edythe to go.
“ I think I will have a headache later. If you would bring me a
drink.”
“My lady,” Edythe said.
Some time went by. They heard nothing from
Ascalon, nothing from Acre. Edythe made the women potions
containing mostly honey and wine and spice. She put the tincture of
artemisia in ajar with a firm stopper. One day when she went up to
the palace, she came on Johanna in a flying rage, storming up and
down the hall.
“Have you heard this? Tell her! Tell her!”
By the throne Rouquin stood, taking a cup from a
page. He said, “Not likely.” He wore a long loose shirt and hose,
no armor, but his sword on his belt, his gloves thrust under the
buckle. He gave Edythe a brief, hot look. She remembered the last
time she had seen him, and her heart jumped. She tore her gaze away
from him.
Johanna’s face was magnificent with anger. She spun
toward Edythe, her arms flying out. Her coif had come loose, and
she pulled at it, and released a tumble of her curly red-gold hair
across the yellow silk shoulders of her gown.
“They have offered me up to the Saracens.”
“ What?” Edythe said.
Johanna stalked across the room. Along the divans
the other women murmured and bowed as she walked anywhere near them
and giggled when she had passed. A table fell over. A cup rolled.
As she neared Edythe, she cried, “They have offered me to marry one
of the Saracens!”
“Safadin is not so bad,” Rouquin said, smiling. He
drank the wine.
“No, when he has a scimitar and you have a sword.”
She stamped her foot. “ I will not marry an unbelieving pagan
hound.”
Edythe drew back with the other women, trying not
to smile. Rouquin was clearly not conveying this as a serious
offer; she thought Richard himself would have to come before her to
make this even a matter of question. Johanna in full fury was like
a small storm, gusting up and down the hall, things flying in her
wake. Probably enjoying herself.
Now she blew past Rouquin and flung herself down on
the throne, where she was wont to sit when Richard was not there.
She glared at her cousin. “My brother is being amusing. He cannot
mean this.”
Rouquin shrugged. “ I don’t know if Safadin is any
more inclined to it than you are.” His eyes moved, and Edythe
caught his glance, but then he turned back to Johanna. He said,
“The King wants you to swear you will not deal anymore with
Isabella.”
“Oh,” Johanna said. She looked suddenly smaller,
the air gone out of her. “ Is that why you were in Acre?” She waved
a hand at him. “ Tell me everything that’s going on there. And
Berengaria will want to know about her garden.”
“Guy still rules,” Rouquin said. “ I don’t know
about the garden. Let me go, Jo, I have to leave soon.”
“Go,” she said. “ Tell Richard I will have a
Christian husband, or none.”
Edythe went out onto the terrace, into the dark;
she thought, He would marry his sister to a Saracen, but I am
not fit to be allowed into Jerusalem.
She knew Richard did not mean the marriage offer
seriously. It was his way, she thought, of punishing Johanna for
meddling with Isabella. He seemed to have fallen into a playful way
of dealing with Saladin when they weren’t fighting, these mock
negotiations, like boys dueling with sticks. The moon was rising, a
little less than full, clouds drifting over its face like islands
in the air.
Someone was coming, and she turned. Rouquin walked
up beside her and leaned on the rail.
“The King has a message for you, as well.”
“Oh,” she said. “ What, is he marrying me off,
too?” And put her hand over her mouth, before she said too
much.
He laughed. “No. He said, ‘ Tell her she’s a good
little monster.’”
She lowered her hand and looked out to sea. “He
thinks I’m his familiar, like a toad.”
“They call you the King’s witch. You saved Acre,”
he said. “Guy could not have kept Conrad out. He wasn’t even ready
when the safe conduct came, much less when he saw how many men
Conrad had brought, and ships, too. If I and my company had not
been there, Conrad would have Acre now.”
She said, “ I’m glad he doesn’t.” Berengaria
would have lost her garden, then, she thought. She turned to
him, wanting to hold him there, to keep his attention. “How can he
do that? Attack Christians on Crusade, when he thinks he’s King of
Jerusalem?”
“ I think his Jerusalem is different from ours,”
Rouquin said.
She had not seen him since the night before they
marched on the Holy City. She said, “How close did you get, last
month?”
One of his shoulders lifted and fell. “A few days’
hard riding. But they would not continue. The other lords. They
were threatening to leave on their own—Hugh of Burgundy and the
French, the Flemings, all the local men, even Guy—just ride away
from Richard, run back here to the coast where it’s safe.”
She said, “Oh, God.”
“It was harder every step. The Saracens burned all
the villages in the way, all the fields; there was no forage,
hardly any graze for the horses. They shot down horses from ambush.
We were running out of food. They had poisoned the wells. We’d have
to fight all the way back, too, and we had nothing to eat but dying
horses. Saladin’s army may be gone, but they hate us out
there.”
She said nothing. Her lips tasted salt; the wind
sang off the edge of the roof behind her.
“ I don’t blame them,” he said. “They’re great
fighters and Jerusalem is theirs, as much as ours. If I were one of
them I’d be fighting us too.”
She gave him a startled look. “That must be heresy.
Are you going to confess that?”
“Oh, come,” he said, scornful. “ I was born halfway
out the church door. Angevins don’t confess, it would take too
long.”
She laughed. “ What does Richard say?”
“ Richard wants that city. But I’m beginning to
think even he . . . There’s this marriage offer.”
She said, “He can’t mean that. As you said. He is
just having a little joke with Saladin.” Still, she thought,
he is looking for other ways out of this. Her heart
clenched; she thought of what the beggar had said, and Yeshua ben
Yafo.
“Anyway,” Rouquin said, “I came back.”
She remembered what she had told him, before they
left, and leaned toward him, and he bent and their mouths
met.
“ I have to go soon,” he said, a while later, his
arms around her. “ When my men are all loaded on the ships. We have
to get back to Ascalon; we’re building a fortress, and trying to
take another place, down the coast toward Egypt.” He kissed her
cheek and her nose and her mouth again.
“How will you know when the ship is ready?”
“They’ll ring the church bell.”
“ Why can’t we come down to Ascalon? Jaffa is
boring.”
“ It’s just a pile of rocks, right now. We have
some hovels raised. Johanna won’t endure that. You stay here.” He
kissed her again.
She leaned her head on his shoulder. Better he
leave. Better they keep this to a few kisses. But even as she
thought that, she was lifting her head and he was turning his. He
licked her lips and she parted them and he slid his tongue over
hers. She shut her eyes. He was groping through her gown; he had
too knowing a way with women’s clothing. She laid her hand on his
chest. She wanted to touch his body, to feel his skin against hers,
to taste him, mouth him, to study him and know him. The church bell
began to ring.
He drew his hand out. “Next time,” he said, and
kissed her mouth again and went away. She shrank back to the wall,
thinking this could go nowhere good. But she would not turn back;
she wanted where it went, whatever happened afterward.
Saladin had gone to Damascus. Humphrey said the
Sultan was having family trouble, maybe an uprising, that the
Muslim priests were preaching against him and the Caliph himself
had rebuked him for losing Acre and Jaffa to the Christians.
Humphrey had told Richard about the hashishiyyun, the sect
that practiced political murder, and now came a report that Saladin
had wakened one morning to find two of their knives by his
bed.
In the countryside around Ascalon were men who had
not stopped fighting just because the Sultan was gone, who fought,
simply as a matter of course, whoever tried to rule them. Richard
was hammering these, attacking their villages and running them down
piecemeal, driving them to submit or leave. Every day he rode out
with enough men to move fast and punch hard and went looking for
enemies.
He said, “ We found nobody today, not even any
sign.”
He sounded gloomy about that. Rouquin thought the
local small game was no solace for Jerusalem. They were in the hall
in Ascalon, small and grim and cold in spite of the smoky braziers.
“My sister is well?” the King said, abruptly, turning toward
Rouquin.
“Like an ox. She has Edythe make her all kinds of
potions and elixirs and infusions.”
“Can she make her an infusion that will keep her
out of trouble?” Richard slumped in his chair, his feet thrust
forward.
Rouquin laughed. He said, “ What we need is to plan
another attack on Jerusalem.”
Richard’s head went back, his eyes shut. “There is
no army anymore. Who would go? You and I and Mercadier?”
“That would be a start. A smaller army. Better
supplies. If we could stash supplies on the way, then getting back
wouldn’t be such a problem. We know better how to fight them now,
too.”
Richard lay sprawled on the throne. “I think this
is, as usual, more complicated than you make it. Although if I had
eight thousand soldiers like you, I could take heaven. That was
good work, in Acre.”
Rouquin would not let him turn off the subject of
Jerusalem. “The winter is ending. We could try an early campaign. I
could do some scouting. Start planning the supplies.”
Richard’s fingers tapped on the arm of the throne.
“ It’s tempting. I just came back and I’m already itching to get
into the saddle again.”
Rouquin said, “Then scout with me.” This was how it
felt to lose; you wanted to go win again as soon as you could, to
erase the humiliation. The loss rode you like a bear on a stag
until you got it down under you and ate its heart. Richard would
come around. Jerusalem was still out there; they could still reach
it. He went down to the half-ruined city, where his men were
quartered in an old mosque.
Rouquin would not stop talking about Jerusalem,
and Richard began considering a new attack. But first he sent for
Humphrey de Toron, who had come down from Acre with Rouquin. He
would not stay long, rude and harsh as the place was; Richard
thought it would take years to rebuild Ascalon, and the harbor had
a problem with sand. Yet the oldest parts of the city were
beautiful, even broken and ruined: a dense pattern of tiled arches
and courtyards, fountains, grillwork, balconies, part Arab, part
Greek, part something else indefinable. He and Humphrey talked of
this for a while, the young man standing before him several moments
before Richard remembered to tell him to sit.
He liked talking to Humphrey, who was clever and
observant. When this was over, finally over, he wanted to do a lot
more to Humphrey. In the meantime, there were these conversations.
“You were in Acre,” he said. “ For this plot of Conrad’s.”
“Yes. Your cousin is a master of these things; he
put a lot of men in the right places, and Conrad abruptly changed
his mind.”
“Rouq’ is good on the ground. What he cannot see,
sometimes . . .” Richard sat forward, his arms on his knees.
“Jerusalem is much farther than it seems. There is more between us
and it than mere country. More trouble.”
The young man said, “Yes, my lord. I believe
that.”
“ It’s so far from the coast. The supply problem is
the backbreaker.” Richard rubbed his hands together. “The old Kings
held it for a hundred years. Baldwin, my great-grandfather Fulk,
Amalric, the Leper. Yet now I cannot see how they did it.”
Humphrey said, “They never did hold it all. What
they did control were the right places—where you must be master, to
keep Jerusalem. Nablus, Kerak, Ramleh, the fords of the Jordan.
They had a truce with Egypt. And they weren’t up against
Saladin.”
Richard sat staring at the floor. He was
remembering that campfire two months ago, halfway to Jerusalem, and
Guy telling him,“ We can’t go on.” Even Guy, who owed him
everything, telling him, “ I will start back with the others in the
morning.”
He said, stubbornly, “These lords now are a pack of
greyhounds, who are happiest watching the game from far off.”
Humphrey, of course, the prettiest of them.
Humphrey said, “ What they wanted, you have given
them—Acre, the coast, Jaffa. Cyprus.”
Richard said, “ What I want—”
He stopped. The taste of turning back still sour.
Even the great victory at Arsuf was a rock in his gut now. He had
to take Jerusalem to get this over with, but he could not shake the
suspicion that he had let his reach go past his grasp. He stood
up.
“ What I want is the Holy City. What I came
for.”
“My lord, you can take it, perhaps, and even hold
it while you are there.” The young man rose with him. “But you will
go back to the west, and then we will lose it all again. Because
none of us is like you.” In Humphrey’s slim young face, his dark
eyes widened, solemn. “As Safadin said, you are the Alexander of
the Franks.” Then suddenly Humphrey leaned toward him and kissed
him.
Richard caught hold of his wrist. But he took the
kiss, held it deep and hard, all the pent-up desire in him like a
scorching brand. In his hand the slender wrist turned, and Richard
let go, and Humphrey wound his arms around his neck, his lips
greedy, their bodies pressed together. Richard thrust himself
against him. The creak of a door warned him that someone was
coming. He drew back, and Humphrey stepped away, his face
red.
A page came into the doorway; Richard nodded to him
and the boy approached them, a bow to Humphrey, a deep bow to his
King, his face clear, suspecting nothing. “My lord, there is a
letter—”
Humphrey said, “I take my leave, then, my lord.”
His voice trembled. He would not meet Richard’s eyes, but went
out.
Richard reached for the letter, watching the young
man go. The hard lust packed him, a heat past fire. Humphrey wanted
him, too. He had guessed but not known. He could not speak; his
mind leaped on to what came next between them. He had to collect
himself. He looked down at the letter in his hand; he felt as if he
had just fought a battle.
The letter in his hand bore his mother’s seal, much
tampered with, and his sister’s, clean. He thumbed it open. His
mother greeted him with a scold, that he had gotten them into this,
and then told him his brother John was conniving with King Philip
to steal Normandy.
He balled up the letter only half-read. Philip
would not even heed the Pope, and why should he, if Richard could
not take Jerusalem ? He stamped around the rough little hall, the
urge rising in him to attack again.
In Jaffa, Johanna could not leave the palace
without meeting a crowd that jeered her and cursed Richard; she
went by ship back to Acre, there being now a busy stream of ships
up and down the coast, and in Acre it was the same. The great city
was full of brawling men, drunks, cripples, beggars and whores,
Crusaders trying to get back to the west, and local people selling
them whatever they wanted at ridiculous prices. She traveled
through the streets in a litter, to avoid these howling mobs, but
when they got to the church her guard had to form a circle around
her to force a way through the press of bodies.
In French, in Syrian, the people screamed curses on
Richard, on the Crusade, on her.
“Frankish dog!”
On the porch of the church, she left the litter and
went quickly in the front door. There were pages, squires, all
around, lining her way. Then in the dark aisle, while she was in
the midst of her own court, someone brushed against her and thrust
a flat stick into her hand.
She clutched it, knowing what it was without
looking. In the dark she had seen nothing of whoever had given it
to her. The pages around her herded her up three steps into the
royal cabinet, and she sat rigid through a pious sermon about
enduring trials.
It was not Richard’s fault they had failed. She
burned with this. She had talked to Humphrey, to Rouquin, to other
lords, and she knew what had happened. She thought of ordering a
charge of her knights into the crowd, to teach them how to see
this, and at once knew she could not. Someone might be hurt, some
innocent.
The reed had a star on it, steps, and three wavy
lines. She showed it to Edythe, back at the palace.
“He will meet me at the sea gate, there by the
steps, at Vespers.”
Edythe said, “Yes, he’s very clever.”
“He will require something of me—what am I to do?
Ah, God, I hate him. I wish—I wish I could get rid of him—”
Edythe said, “For the love of God, do not meet him.
The King knows, Johanna. That’s what my lord Rouquin meant, that
time. The King knows everything.”
Not everything. Edythe did not know everything, so
how could Richard? Johanna lay awake, unable to sleep, remembering
her mother’s letters. He could build a castle of false meaning on
those letters. By dawn she had decided not to meet de Sablé. Edythe
was right about that. But she would send for Humphrey, who had long
before offered to help her with this, and who had just come back to
Acre.
Humphrey said, “ I know a few . . . useful men.
They would cast some fear into him. Let him know you are not to be
trifled with. But they will need to be paid.”
“Oh, money,” she said. “The bane of the
Plantagenets. Would there were Jews here, I would pawn my gold
chains.”